The post Allplay announces the first game in its “Masterworks” line, Dominant Species! appeared first on Graphic Policy.
Allplay has announced a new "Masterworks" line of games in partnership with artist Ian O'Toole.
Back to the history of New York City! We have begun with the city’s origin before the founding of the United States and left off in the 1880s in the last post – when New York was undeniably the economic and cultural center of the United States. Today, we are covering New York in its most iconic form as a moloch of steel, concrete, and millions of people. A chronological narrative will not help us here. Instead, we adopt a thematic approach and look the economy, construction, infrastructure, and culture which made New York from the late 19th to the mid-20th century the model city of high modernity.
If you want to read more posts like this – for example, the next instalment in the New York series – I strongly recommend you subscribe to the blog: All new posts in your inbox right when they go live!
New York had been America’s most dynamic hub for trade and manufacturing for decades. Yet the city’s riches had been shared unequally, just like the risks in producing them. In the late 19th and early 20th century, New York’s working class grew more assertive and found more political support to improve their lives: For example, the three Tenement House Acts of 1867, 1879, and 1901 mandated such luxuries as windows in every apartment and toilets in every building.
The 1909/1910 textile worker strikes led to improved pay and shorter hours. Just one year later, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Lower Manhattan burned down and 146 garment workers died – many of them unable to escape through the staircase because management kept the doors locked during shifts. The fire catastrophe led to a public outcry against such practices and New York state introduced better workplace and fire safety regulations.
The garment workers were in some ways emblematic for the New York working class – most of them were young immigrants (especially Jewish and Italian). In another, they represented a shift – almost all of them were women, and their struggle for better working conditions mirrored the force of the American women’s movement in the political arena.
In one way, however, they represented New York’s present, but not its future: The industrialization of the 19th century had turned New York into the largest manufacturing hub of the world. Yet manufacturing, the physical production of goods, ran out of steam when the improved productivity provided most people in the United States with most of their basic needs. Eager customers were thus not to be taken for granted anymore. Instead, they had to be wooed and their desires – for items of whose existence they had recently been still ignorant – awakened. New York became a hotbed for the growing advertisement industry (with which Madison Avenue is synonymous until today) as well as for shopping (here, Fifth Avenue is the symbolic street). Our age of trends, shopping as a leisure activity, and overconsumption cannot be imagined without New York.
In the 19th century, foreign capital had funded the expansion into the American West, but now the capital flows reversed: American capital was instrumental in financing the Allies’ Great War effort. At the end of the Great War, America was for the first time a net creditor nation. Its role in the international financial system expanded after the war as American loans enabled defeated Germany to pay its reparations to the Allies (who, in turn, paid off their American war loans). At the same time as New York took London’s place as the premier finance hub in the world, America at large withdrew from the world under a renewed isolationism and the xenophobia which came with the Red Scare after the Bolshevik Revolution.
Political upheaval did not stop the investment craze of the 1920s: When a bomb exploded in Wall Street in 1920 and killed 30 people, stock trading resumed normally the next day – much in contrast to 1920 Wall Street (Perepau Llistosella, Looping Games), where the bombing marks the end of the game (and players hope to have made all their profits by then).
The New York-based financial system was robust enough to withstand such external shocks, but it collapsed under its own contradictions: The stock market boom of the 1920 led to ever more capital pouring into the New York Stock Exchange (at the expense of all other forms of investments, for example the American overseas loans on which the global financial system was now based). The spectacular gains fueled a debt-based speculation bubble which burst in October 1929. The inadequate response by central banks which did nothing to combat the contraction of the monetary supply led to an extended, global economic crisis – the Great Depression.
Unemployment and poverty plagued New York much like the rest of the world in the 1930s. The city bounced back through ambitious public works initiated by the energetic new mayor Fiorello LaGuardia (many of them funded by New Deal funds in a cross-party cooperation between the Republican LaGuardia and the Democratic president Franklin D. Roosevelt). Still, New York’s economy only recovered when demand for manufactured goods skyrocketed because of World War II: The industrial giant rose one last time. One example of New York’s awesome productive capacity may suffice: From 1941 to 1945, the New York Navy Yard built more warships than all of Japan combined. The United States won World War II because of their industrial productivity, and New York was the beating heart of it.
New York had always grown. From the 1880s on, the city grew in a heretofore barely used dimension – upwards. The twin innovations of the elevator and steel frame construction allowed for building heights which had been considered impractical, if not impossible, before. While New York was not the pioneer of these technologies – that merit belongs to Chicago – they were accepted in Manhattan on a scale not known before. Ever more “skyscrapers”, as the tall buildings were soon to be known, sprang up between the Hudson and the East River, giving the city a characteristic look from far away. New York’s skyline has been continually changing, but since then, it has always been dominated by skyscrapers – as has been the image of the city in the public imagination.
Board games are no exception. No theme is as prevalent in games about New York as the construction of skyscrapers. Some are specific, like Flatiron (Isra C./Shei S., Ludonova) which has players build the eponymous Flatiron Building together, but many could be set in any city with tall buildings – but as they are about tall buildings, their designers and publishers think they fit best for a New York setting: Manhattan (Karl-Heinz Koch, Fagus) is a variant of Acquire (Sid Sackson, Avalon Hill) to which the third dimension is added. New York City (Stefan Feld, Queen Games) is a remake of Rialto (Stefan Feld, TMG) – just that the struggle for majorities in Venetian districts of the original, fought with councilmembers, has been replaced by a struggle for majorities in New York boroughs, fought with – you guessed it – skyscrapers.
The skyscrapers got ever taller: The first steel frame buildings in the 1880s and 1890s were well below 100 meters. In 1909, the Singer Building (187m) was the first structure in New York to exceed the height of Europe’s church spires – the first time that the world’s tallest building stood in New York. The city would retain that honor until the 1970s with a succession of ever taller skyscrapers.
The most iconic one was the Empire State Building whose construction was begun in October 1929 – just weeks before the stock market crash. It became the most visible sign of the economic crisis: Even five years after its completion in 1931, half of the Empire State Building’s office space remained empty. Like the rest of New York, it recovered by the 1940s. It would remain the world’s tallest building until it was overtaken by another New York icon in 1973 – the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
New York did not only grow vertically. Originally, the city had been confined to Manhattan Island and gradually expanded into what became the Bronx. In 1898, New York merged with its neighbor Brooklyn (itself America’s third-largest city at the time) as well Queens county and Staten Island to become a massive metropolis of more than three million inhabitants.
This sprawling moloch, however, was initially still centered on Manhattan, as most people worked there and thus couldn’t live too far away: In 1900, more than half of New Yorkers lived in Manhattan. That changed with the construction of the New York subway from 1900 on. New York was late to embark on such a project (London had started in the 1860s), but it was undertaken with the characteristic boldness of the city and soon became the largest in the world.
Thus, the geography of the city changed: New Yorkers could work in Manhattan, but commute every day from one of the other boroughs. As land there was a lot cheaper, a residential construction boom set in, and by the 1920s, Brooklyn had become the most populous borough of New York.
The growth of the city required its transport and leisure infrastructure to keep up. One man would become synonymous with it from the 1920s on: Robert Moses, starting out on the Long Island State Park Commission in 1924, became responsible for all kinds of parks, beaches, roads, bridges, and tunnels for both the state and the city of New York over the next decades.
These projects shaped the face of New York: The parks, both in the center and on the outskirts, provided very real benefits in one of the largest, most densely settled cities in the world. And the transport projects took inspiration from the new trend of motorized individual transport – and reinforced it.
Large-scale engineering projects like these go beyond the mere technical aspects. Moses’s creations were shaped by his ideas about how society should look like. For example, already his very first project – Jones Beach State Park on Long Island – outlined his ideal: It provided New Yorkers with a beautifully designed leisure park on the seashore. They arrived there after a pleasurable drive on the new parkways through lush greenery – by car, as no train or subway station was built in Jones Beach, and the bridges crossing the parkway were too low for buses to pass through. This lack of public transport meant that Jones Beach was exclusively accessible for the middle classes.
An even more striking example is Riverside Park in Manhattan along the Hudson River. Around a third of the park is in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Harlem, two thirds in the predominantly White Morningside Heights and the Upper West Side. These southern two thirds were liberally sprinkled with dozens and dozens of playgrounds, the third in Harlem only received one – and here, the iron lattice at the toilets was “decorated” with little ape sculptures.
As you can see, Robert Moses was not quite a nice guy. We’ll see more of him in the next post in this series!
America’s new, more assertive role in the world after World War I also increased global interest in the country’s cultural output. American literature developed a new confidence, and American jazz became the hottest new music around the world. New York as America’s cultural center both attracted established artists (like the jazz musicians Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong who both made the city their home in 1923) and produced its own original creations (like the Harlem Renaissance, which marked the first time that a movement of Black American writers and visual artists left their imprint on the wider American cultural consciousness).
One of the institutions of the 1920s New York cultural scene has gotten its own board game: 1923 Cotton Club (Pau Carles, Looping Games). The historical Cotton Club was founded in Harlem in 1923 and soon became the venue to see many of the finest jazz musicians – an attraction not only for regular New Yorkers, but also for the celebrities of the time. That, in turn, made the club even more attractive… well, not for everyone. While the performers on stage were Black, the club would not admit Black patrons (except for the rare Black celebrity). That is not explicitly addressed by the board game, but attentive players will notice that the almost all of the artists which can perform at the players’ clubs are Black, almost all of the celebrities which may attend the club (and are the chief source of points) are White – as are the gangsters.
“Gangsters?” you may ask. “In a game about running a nightclub?” Yes, as we are in the age of the prohibition of alcohol in the United States. This fleeting episode (1920 to 1933), and the massive expansion of organized crime which came with it, is almost as irresistible to board game designers as the construction of skyscrapers. Sometimes, it is only the corollary to another activity (like in 1923 Cotton Club).
At other occasions, it takes center stage: Speakeasy (Vital Lacerda, Eagle-Gryphon Games) is all about building a crime empire in Manhattan based on the distribution of illegal alcohol. Frankly, there is a mafia game set in New York for all kinds of gaming tastes: Speakeasy caters to heavy euro gamer, The Godfather: Corleone’s Empire (Eric M. Lang, CMON) to those who love miniatures.
Blood Feud in New York (Kyle Weinandy, Eagle-Gryphon Games) is for combat-oriented gamers, and Nutty Business (Alain Rivollet, Studio H) for those who don’t want to take their game so seriously: Gangs of squirrels try to dominate the nut-smuggling business in Central Park, 1925.
Of course, all these mafia games could be set elsewhere. After all, alcohol was prohibited everywhere in the United States. New York, however, is irresistible as the biggest city, where presumably also the biggest crimes are committed. It is no coincidence that both Superman and Batman, those heroes of the Golden Age of Comics, fight their mastermind criminal enemies in fictionalized versions of New York (Metropolis and Gotham, respectively). Apropos: Age of Comics: The Golden Years (Giacomo Cimini/Sónia Gonçalves, Lirius Games) allows players to run a comic book publisher, develop ideas, print, and sell comic books… and of course, they do so in New York.
New York’s status as leading America in culture and crime will feature in our next (and last) instalment of this series. Watch this space!
Fifth Avenue (Wilko Manz, Ravensburger)
1920 Wall Street (Perepau Llistosella, Looping Games)
Flatiron (Isra C./Shei S., Ludonova)
Manhattan (Karl-Heinz Koch, Fagus)
Acquire (Sid Sackson, Avalon Hill)
New York City (Stefan Feld, Queen Games)
Ticket to Ride: New York (Alan R. Moon, Days of Wonder)
1923 Cotton Club (Pau Carles, Looping Games)
Speakeasy (Vital Lacerda, Eagle-Gryphon Games)
The Godfather: Corleone’s Empire (Eric M. Lang, CMON)
Blood Feud in New York (Kyle Weinandy, Eagle-Gryphon Games)
Nutty Business (Alain Rivollet, Studio H)
Age of Comics: The Golden Years (Giacomo Cimini/Sónia Gonçalves, Lirius Games)
For a concise introduction, especially focused on local politics, see Lankevich, George J.: New York City. A Short History, New York University Press, New York City, NY/London 1998.
If you want a treatment which is both more in-depth and more journalistic (and lavishly illustrated) and don’t mind its history practically ending around 1970, see the book version of the 17-hour PBS documentary from 1999: Burns, Ric/Sanders, James/Ades, Lisa: New York. An Illustrated History, Knopf, New York City, NY 2001.
New stats have been added to two new places in the app: the Overview screen and on Insights!
Two new sections have been added to the PLAY STATISTICS segment, This Month and This Year.
These have been added between the current sections, so the sections are now, in order from left to right:
As always, the section you select will be remembered, with this update this will be reset one-time only.
The charts on Insights can now be toggled between being based on the number of plays and the time played.
Above the chart section of the page, you will find a the option to switch between the Play count and Total time played. All charts below will be changed:
On the top left of this section you can now also find a magnifying glass.
Tapping on this will zoom out your stats to the next level: from Month to Year, and from Year to All Time.
As always, you can still tap on a bar in the Plays bar chart to zoom in.
Labels have been added (where possible) to the Plays bar chart, so it’s easier to see the absolute values of these.
* Stats on time are available with the Power expansion.
It’s always great to see games from Asia make it stateside. As someone who is half Asian, I’ll always be drawn to games from my home continent. But in a time of crazy tariffs and international uncertainty, there’s a lot of gold that never gets its spotlight over here in the States.
Formosa Formosa, which literally translates to “beautiful Taiwan” in Portuguese, fortunately fell into my hands at the GAMA (Game Manufacturers Association) Expo this year. Designer Kirk Beiser is an expat living in Taiwan who happened to pack a few copies in his suitcase for the long flight to Louisville, Kentucky.
With events like the Tokyo Game Market and Asian Board Games Festival showcasing fantastic titles, we’re often on the outside looking in. Different cultural upbringings shape different ways of thinking and often lead to games that feel unlike much of what we see from Western designers. We can only hope more make their way stateside, whether through new distribution channels or smuggled over in luggage!
Formosa Formosa is a “toss-and-write” game in which every component is used, including the box itself. Players take turns until the final round, with the number of rounds scaling based on the player count so everyone receives an equal number of turns.…
The post Formosa Formosa Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.
Dive into history and heroism with Crusaders: The Siege of Acre 1291, a solitaire wargame that lets you experience the last stand of the Knights Templar and the Crusaders in the Holy Land.
Relive the courageous stand of some 15,000 Crusader soldiers, Knights Templars, Teutonic Knights, and Hospitallers as they defend Acre, a critical port city in the Holy Land, against a massive Mamluk army of some 80,000 soldiers armed with siege engines and catapults in the century after the Ninth Crusade.
Fighting was brutal. Mamluk archers and catapults rained missiles on the walled city, infantry conducted relentless assaults against its perimeter while miners attempted to breach the defenses of the stronghold from below. From behind its ramparts, the Crusaders repelled attack after attack while leading raiding parties outside of the city as the immense Mamluk army tightened the noose of the defending Crusaders.
When the dust settled, the city of Acre was overun by the Mamluk army. Crusaders and citizens were killed as the remnants of the Crusader army fled back to Europe while the legendary Order of the Knights Templars retreated to the island of Cyprus. The Crusaders lost their last major stronghold of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, never to return. Can you hold Acre?
-Grant
by Beth Heile
Instead of the usual lineup of game announcements and post-convention hauls, I wanted to write and photograph about the random tidbits that caught my attention at this year’s Gen Con, including a wonderful interview with Felicia Day (see below).- Hell of a Deal
- Entropy
- Hanami
- Fliptoons: Season 2
- Night at the Zoo
These are “super” early, just observations I’ve had that could easily be wrong.
We are in the early stages of discovery (at least I am) where it’s difficult to evaluate some cards because you need to see them interacting with other cards. In particular the Near/Far Frontier worlds have some big swings.
Some Notes on the Frontier Decks
Note — Both decks are exactly half black (worlds you buy) and half red (worlds you conquer).
︎︎︎︎︎︎
Fellow Meeple Mountaineer Andrew Holmes recently published a review covering Unmatched: The Witcher - Realms Fall and Steel & Silver, and his opening comment mentioned that we at Meeple Mountain differ on our opinions of the Unmatched franchise. But that makes sense as different reviewers covering differently themed sets are going to land differently on their thoughts.
(The correct opinion is that Unmatched is awesome)
However, Andrew is right that Unmatched is a great system because of its simplicity, quick pace, and heavily contrasting roster of fighters. And like him, I’m the ideal demographic, but for different reasons. The original game, Star Wars: Epic Duels, was played dozens upon dozens of times by my friends in middle school and me. We even found custom heroes online and printed them out, and though they were wildly unbalanced, it was a blast nonetheless.
Fans of Unmatched will recognize Bruce Lee as a highly sought-after expansion, being the first single-character pack and, at times, running upwards of $250 on the secondary market. Fortunately for those patient enough, Bruce Lee has returned in both an affordable and memorable set, going toe-to-toe with the famous boxer Muhammad Ali. I wasn’t alive during their height of fame, but their quotes, stories, and larger-than-life personas live on through pop…
The post Unmatched: Lee vs. Ali Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.
Battles in the East (BITE) is a series simulating World War II Eastern Front battles. The system rules are an evolution of the SPI classics Panzergruppe Guderian, Army Group South and Cobra. Unit integrity bonuses include Soviet Corps and vary to show the increasing Soviet cohesion and decreasing German cohesion as the war progresses. HQ units provide higher level combat support and supply advantages to corresponding units in range. BITE also incorporates standardized scales (unit size, distance, time) for easy comparisons. While the series rules allow players to play many games with the same core rules, the scenario rules add unique situational elements of each battle. Each volume includes two battles from one year with two copies of the charts and tables as well as scenario rules and set-up cards for easy reference. Battles in the East Volume 2 offers a strategic simulation of pivotal 1941 Eastern Front conflicts, including the fierce battles at Uman and Tula.
-Grant
Snow muffled every footstep until the only sounds were distant birds and the steady crunch beneath our boots. The silence stretched in every direction: left to right, ahead and behind, as well as all the way up into the thermosphere. We were far away from anywhere. Yet, we knew we were safe. As the darkness settled all around us, we could finally see it: the Borealis: Arctic Expeditions by Dariusz Mindur from Lucky Duck Games with art by Rodrigo Camilo Alves De Almeida, Kevin Sidharta, Inês Toczyska and Ariadna Żytniewska.
The post Borealis: Arctic Expeditions (Saturday Review) appeared first on Tabletop Games Blog.
Michael Shinall's long-delayed CMON design heads to stores
As a natural melancholic, the idea of being drawn to the sea — to drown one’s regrets, whether figuratively or bodily — makes me glad there isn’t a significant body of water within six hundred miles. It isn’t that suicide holds appeal for its own sake. Rather, it’s a fire door in the back, rigged with an alarm but duly located in case of an emergency. Sometimes, when an elderly person goes missing in the mountains, I wonder if they disappeared because of forgetfulness, as the silver alerts would have us believe, or because they could no longer stop remembering.
Deep Regrets, like Judson Cowan’s forthcoming Personal Demons, wears its metaphor on its sleeve only to collar it in gameplay. Perhaps we went to the sea to forget, to scrape our hull free of the barnacles that have accreted there, only to find ourselves fouled with a fresh catch. To mount an escape is to be caught.
Okay, now I’m being melancholic. At least it’s a good fit for Cowan’s intended topic.
Hanging out in port.
“On the surface” is a loaded term for Deep Regrets. That’s because Deep Regrets is about surfaces and what lies beneath them. In terms of character, the surface reading is that you’re a fisherman. Not the catch-and-release kind, but rather the my-livelihood-is-disappearing-with-the-depleting-abyss kind.
Which is what drives your bayman to trawl ever deeper. As the shoals close to the surface grow thin, you seek more benthic prey. It’s a solitary practice, both thematically and at the table. Turns don’t exist in complete isolation from those of your peers; this isn’t a total multiplayer solitaire experience. But as we will see, there’s a lidless membrane between you and your peers that’s never quite breached.
For the most part — on the surface — Cowan plays it straight. The entire game could be described in that hobbyist shorthand that sounds alien to outsiders. Fishing is a press-your-luck minigame that expends dice and other resources to land the best fish. Every turn is framed around either a day at sea or one in harbor, trading your catch for equipment. There are subsystems aplenty: permanent and temporary dice, rods and reels with variable benefits, fish both great and small.
Check out my cool shades. They conceal my squamous nature.
What’s interesting about these systems, though, is what they communicate about both the gameplay and your character.
Starting with gameplay, Deep Regrets is — on the surface — an incredibly chancy plaything. Early on, there are clues one can follow: the shadow beneath the water reveals whether a catch is small, middling, or large, and various depths translate to creatures that are increasingly dangerous to land-based mammals. Your bayman also has access to a few starting tools, such as a can of worms for peeking at a shoal’s face-down card and a lifeboat for beating a hasty retreat to port if your odds at sea turn south.
It isn’t long before it becomes apparent that Deep Regrets isn’t as aleatory as all that. Oh, there’s always a sense of risk. It isn’t uncommon for a cocksure hand to take one risk too many and invite the wrath of something truly monstrous. There are cards in the deck, whether the base deck or one of its multiple expansions, that can very much ruin your day.
Still, there’s so much mitigation at play that it’s hard to regard Deep Regrets as quite as chancy as some have made it out to be. Failing to catch a fish results in grabbing a “dink” — fishing slang, not lifestyle slang — which offers some benefit of its own, whether better fishing or some cash value, to offset the sting of failure. Even a cursory glance at the equipment shop reveals tools that will offset any number of flubs or miscasts. It isn’t enough to strip the game of its uncertainty altogether, but these are hardly uninformed decisions.
This is all good stuff, and would provide plenty to mull over. But, once again, this only brushes the surface.
Not all catches are created equal.
It’s appropriate that where Deep Regrets expands its horizons is via the regret deck, a thick stack piled with all sorts of misgivings and heartbreaks. At regular intervals, your hapless fishers will land something special. A mermaid, perhaps, so shimmering with glory that it breaks your heart to haul her ashore. A leviathan, its mind linking to yours in its lashing final moments. Or maybe you’ll just sell something nasty at the fish market and feel bad about it. Regardless of the cause, these junctures see you drawing a regret.
Regrets matter in two senses. First, the number you hold in your hand determines your character’s current madness. The madder you become, the greater the risks you’ll take at sea and the weirder the creatures you’re willing to sell at market. Second, the sum of those cards determines which player is bitterest upon the game’s completion. This means tossing out your highest-scoring trophy.
What’s curious about regrets, though, is that they aren’t wholly undesirable. True enough, you would rather not have such terrible regrets that you fling your prize charybdis angrily into the sea. But a handful of regrets is… good, in fact. After a few days at sea, it won’t escape your notice that the deadlier deep shoals are packed with strange creatures. It also won’t escape your notice that these can be sold at higher prices and earn greater scores. But only if you’ve gone a little mad. Maybe even very mad. Not so mad that you ruin yourself. But mad enough to take the right risks and mount the right trophies.
Which is to say, Deep Regrets isn’t really about said regrets being bad, at least not always. In much the same way that Personal Demons doesn’t present fears as bad so much as things that need to be confronted, here one is invited to court regret, to dance with it, to dispel its worst excesses through clean living or self-medication or simple caution. Whatever works. But either way, a life without regrets hoists a lower ceiling, victory-wise.
Just some of the game’s many regrets.
Laid out like this, Deep Regrets’ messaging might come across as trite. Adolescent. As a species, we’ve told countless stories about how our regrets and failures are crucial stepping stones on the path to adulthood, from Picard being transformed into a timid science officer because he didn’t get shanked as a cocky ensign to the memory-erasing shenanigans of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
But Deep Regrets doesn’t come across as an adolescent musing. Its passage to success isn’t as straight as “regrets good.” Plenty of its regrets are well worth casting off. There’s a certain temporal wiggliness to the process; if you regret losing your arm or sacrificing your sister, I’m not wholly sure what it means when those regrets are discarded. Did we… forget? Get over it? Prevent its having happened through some demersal bargain? No idea. But the effect is one of curated regret, cautious regret, not wholesale acceptance or dismissal.
This makes Deep Regrets interesting rather than perfect. I wish the game had been pacier, but in some spots Cowan’s eagerness seems to have gotten the better of him. After the first few rounds, turns begin to bloat with extra dice, fish, equipment, and dinks. In the end, it isn’t the chanciness that’s the problem; it’s the replete tools for extending a turn and making outcomes more certain. As the game grows longer, its charms wear thin. Eventually, they rupture like aquatic flesh that’s gone too long without refrigeration.
Mounting my trophies, buoyed by regret.
Still, Deep Regrets is smarter than it looks. It’s a game that rewards peering beneath the surface, both in terms of gameplay and as a ludic examination of a life lived without too many guardrails. I can say this with complete certainty: I don’t regret the time I’ve spent with it. Not in the slightest.
Complimentary copies of Deep Regrets and its expansions were provided by the designer/publisher.
(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read the next installment in my series Talking About Games, this time tackling the topic of what makes a good list! Naturally, the piece includes a list.)
Plus, more feline fun awaits in Good Kitties and Super Chonk
A trio of veteran board game industry professionals have launched a new tabletop gaming agency, with the aim of helping businesses within the hobby get their games developed and into the market.
Hues and Cues designer Scott Brady, Sagrada co-creator Daryl Andrews and Friendly Skeleton CEO Jacob Way said Best in Play will offer everything from interim executive leadership and designer representation to publisher submission management and crowdfunding strategy.
Brady said, “Best in Play was created to bring together people and opportunities that should already be working with one another.
“Great intellectual properties need the right designers and publishing partners, designers need better access to decision-makers, and companies sometimes need experienced leadership without the time or resources required to build an entire department.”
Best in Play says its five core service areas comprise IP matchmaking, crowdfunding consultation, interim replacement of key personnel, publisher-inventor relations and identifying publishers and licensing opportunities for individual games, multiple projects or designer catalogues.
The company announced at launch that it has already been hired as a consultant for an unspecified US-based “creator-brand merchandising and e-commerce company”, providing senior-level leadership and games-industry expertise while the client continues its search for a permanent head of games.
Best in Play said that project will run the gamut of product development, licensing, publishing, production, crowdfunding and portfolio strategy.
Andrews said of the assignment, “An important initiative should not lose six months of momentum because a key role is temporarily vacant.
“Our model gives clients access to an experienced team that can step in quickly, evaluate the situation and keep products, partnerships and internal teams moving forward.”
The company is also working on a tabletop project based on an unnamed “major video game intellectual property”, with a crowdfunding launch planned for early 2027.
Way said, “A recognizable property may attract attention, but a successful crowdfunding campaign still needs the right product, positioning, audience strategy and operational plan.
“Our goal is to build campaigns that respect the fans, communicate value clearly and create a foundation for success beyond the initial launch.”
As well as the founding trio of managing directors, the Best in Play team also includes strategic contributors David Gordon, the co-creator of Finspan, Eastar Game Manufacturing founder and CEO David Du, Legend of the Five Rings: The Card Game co-designer Erik Dahlman and Daniel Pesante.
The launch comes hot on the heels of Brady having unveiling his new publishing initiative Proof-of-Play late last month, which is designed to tackle one of the tabletop industry’s growing challenges: promising games sitting unpublished because publisher release schedules are already full.
Brady previously launched his development studio A Game Studio at the start of 2024, following the 2020 release of the big-selling Hues and Cues and the success of his cat-themed abstract strategy Boop in 2022.
He is also the co-founder of Play to Z, the publishing house led by former Z-Man Games founder Zev Shlasinger launched by a host of board game industry veterans in 2023.
Fellow Best in Play managing director Daryl Andrews is best known as the co-creator of award-winning tabletop game Sagrada, while his other co-designs include Batman: The Dark Knight Returns – The Game, Donald Duck in Happy Camper and Mistwind.
He previously spent two years as head of talent acquisition at Maestro Media, following several months working in investor relations, before leaving the company in early 2025.
Jacob Way, meanwhile, began his board game career as COO and co-founder of Deep Water Games, which for several years operated as a subsidiary of Ox Eye Media.
Deep Water, which is best known for sketching game MonsDRAWsity, spun out from Ox Eye as an independent business in 2022 under Way before rebranding as Friendly Skeleton.
The publisher is currently in the process of delivering the heavily delayed crowdfunding campaign for Monsdrawsity: Unusual Suspects, created in collaboration with renowned board game review site Shut Up and Sit Down, which was initially estimated to reach backers in May of 2022.
Anyone interested in getting in touch with the team can visit the Best in Play website or email info@thebestinplay.com.
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Gods' Will showed up in my social media feed, comparing itself to Resistance: Avalon like a new kid on the first day of school telling everyone he used to be popular somewhere else. I have heard this pitch. I have reviewed this pitch twice, from Witch Hunt and Human Punishment, two games that made the same promises and delivered the same disappointing results. So when Gods' Will came knocking with the same marketing aura, I had to open the door with at least one eyebrow raised. Maybe I’m just addicted to disappointment, who knows.
After half a dozen plays, I can say with a bit of confidence that Gods' Will is doing more right than wrong here. More importantly, it earns it by fixing the real problems with its predecessors rather than just the ones that look good in a Kickstarter pitch.
Like 90% of social deduction games that have ever existed, there are two teams: Light and Dark. There is also a loner faction, a third party whose goals shift depending on player count and whose presence ensures that the ride from start to finish won’t ever be a smooth one. Every player is a God with a public special ability…
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